Split A4 page into A7 sections

[Chris P. Bacon]

I print A7 booklets using my own printer and A4 paper (that I am going to cut in 8 pieces of A7 pages, each), doing my own hand-made binding.

How do I create A4 templates that have A7 templates incorporated in them so that I could edit each A7 page also separately, yet keep them incorporated in the A4 pages?

Can InDesign do nested templates?

The margins should cascade proportionally for both A4 and A7.

Or I should just do A7 pages, and then when printing, choose to print them all on an A4, but how?

I need both the A4 and A7 views because the full booklet will be cut out from multiple A4.

[Peter Spier]

If you want to print 2 A4 pages on an A3 paper from InDesign, how do you do it on your own printer?

I could use that method to print my A7-s on an A4.

By @Chris P. Bacon

You don't. InDesign is incapable of n-up printing. InDesign's Tile setting is for printing large pages on smaller sheets.

Apparently your printer has an n-up capability built in to the driver, but you will never get it to use the non-printing margins.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Non printing margins can be removed by some Brother software. Let's see if I can actually do it.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Do you know how I enable n-up printing?

[Peter Spier]

What part of incapable don't you understand?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

To summarize this thread, it appears that what you want to do is print your A7 pages 8-up, single-sided, on an A4 sheet.

InDesign has no feature or option for doing this kind of layout or imposition — but, since you are hand cutting and assembling the books, and not trying to print 2-sided, the order of imposition would seem to be irrelevant.

So if your printer will do 8-up printing through its driver, that would be one solution, but it's entirely on settings in the printer driver and dialog, outside of what InDesign can do or control.

If any of that's not correct, feel free to clarify. It can be difficult to find the thread of your intended processes sometimes. 🙂

But there may be one more solution at hand. Export the A7 document to PDF... and then use Acrobat's "Multiple" page feature to impose eight pages on an A4 print sheet. Again, you will have no imposition or order control (unless you laboriously rearrange the pages within InDesign), but it will get your pages to those cut-down sheets, and you can take it from there in assembly and binding.

Because Acrobat doesn't allow a lot of control for this print method, you may have to change your page layouts in ID to accommodate. Specifically, since you can't control the spacing added between page images, you may have to make your InDesign pages borderless or with very narrow margins, allowing for the extra space added by the Acrobat layout.

I'd give this process a look. It's absolutely not right for any kind of automated imposition, 2-sided printing or commercial work, but it seems to be right on target for your in-house, hand-managed workflow.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Thank you, exactly that's what I want.

Brother doesn't seem to have their own desktop printing software, which I find weird.

At least it only supports CSV, TXT and database files, and calls press PDF exported from InDesign a "bad format":

Hopefully it will work with Acrobat..

[Chris P. Bacon]

The image you attached is too small, I cannot see anything on it.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's exactly as it appears in the Acrobat print window; it's just to show page imposition using the Multiple setting.

Very few printers have standalone print software. The universal expectation is that users will be printing from an application that manages the print process, even if it's an intermediary one like Acrobat. There are far, far too many file types to create and maintain a 'print app.' Specific features of any one printer, such as color management, multipage printing, duplex printing etc. are (properly) managed in the print driver, which acts as the intermediary between the app and the printer itself.

And I guess we can add Brother to the long list of those who dislike PDF for all the wrong reasons (mostly, poor document creation and the generally dismal quality of third-party viewers and tools).

[Chris P. Bacon]

And my printer doesn't seem to have 8-up, only 4-up and 9-up:

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

What InDesign can do on print output;

What Acrobat can do on print output;

What your printer can do on output;

are three completely different, unrelated things.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I just need to remove the white margins inserted by my printer driver, they are greyed out in Acrobat so I cannot remove them from there.

To get the real A7 sizes.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There is no option among these three processes that will allow printing to the sheet edge. You will need to accommodate the print-sheet margins in your layout and adjust the pages in InDesign to mesh with them. (That is, a borderless page in ID will acquire that print margin on output.)

Short of cutting down the A4 sheet on the margins as well as into sections, there is no solution for this on a SOHO printer.

[Chris P. Bacon]

This is what I got despite the Acrobat view.

The booklet pages were supposed to fill the whole A4, something does not work properly here.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It looks as if you used Acrobat to do the 8-up layout, then had your printer set to do the same. So your one page ended up being just one page out of eight.

Again, these processes are all completely independent of each other. None of the InDesign or Acrobat settings have anything to do with the printer settings; they effectively create one full print page. The printer settings have nothing to do with the ID or Acrobat settings or output; for multi-page and booklet, the print driver takes 2 or 4 or 8 output pages and combines them into one sheet. There's no useful way to combine these processes. The Acrobat multi-page output to a single printer page is the only solution close to workable for your intentions, at least as far as I can see.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Sorry I had a 25% print area activated in my printer driver, this is what I get:

 

[Chris P. Bacon]

On the Acrobat print screenshot, the black border is the A4 sheet boundaries, the grey area is the margins added by my printer (extra bottom margin), and the white areas are the margins added by Acrobat.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Unless your printer allows adjustment of the margins to zero or near-zero, that's the best you are going to get. Only using borderless A7 pages will get the effective margins any smaller.

SOHO printers are rarely capable of margins smaller than 5-6mm, at best. It's integral to the design.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Do you know by any chance how to remove the margins inserted by Acrobat, the white margins in the print preview?

[Peter Spier]

Set scaling to 100 % and Acrobat will not attempt to fit the entire media size into the printable area of the printer, but the print will still have the unprintable margin required for paper transport through the device.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Where is that setting?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's under "Size," but it does not appear to apply to the Multiple print layout. That's a subtle aspect of print setup — not every feature available for single-page printing is available for things like n-up, multipage and booklet printing.

The only real, real solution to your requirements here is to work on an A4 document page. There is no combination of export and printing magic that will achieve the same result, and nothing that in the end will eliminate the printer margins.

[Chris P. Bacon]

The printing surface is just a stripe, especially for thermal printers, not the page surface, so far as I know, so I don't know why can't the printer rolling mechanism roll the page if it's placed before/after the printing head, without margins.

What you said previously to remove page margins - the issue with that is that I need a line printed at the A7 boundaries because I need to cut them out. If I remove the document margins, the line will be printed too close to the text. Otherwise I have to do the measurements at the page margins to cut out the A7s.

This is what you mean by "work on an A4 document page", to remove the document margins?

[Chris P. Bacon]

Yes, so that's not an option.

I don't know what's the purpose of the margins inserted by Acrobat, especially the kind of margins that cannot be removed.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The purpose of the Multipage option is to produce reading versions of a document at some reduction in number of pages printed, not to produce a print master. The margins are to separate the pages visually for that purpose.

SOHO printers have margin limits because edge-to-edge printing (as some photo printers do) is a costly and complex feature to include, especially for larger sheets. They simply aren't designed to accommodate commercial printing needs. Nor, actually, are commercial printers and presses; it's almost universally assumed that flat work will be printed on an oversized sheet and cut down to provide printing to the edges.

As so often with your projects, you're trying to do things that are either very demanding/high-end, on systems that just don't incorporate the necessary features, or simply can't be done with any reasonable combination of available tools. Even a professional print shop can't print an A4 sheet edge to edge for cut-down into A7 pages with no margins or borders. They would impose A7 pages on some convenient master sheet size, and then cut it down, outer borders included.

The only way you can achieve your goals is to print fewer A7 pages on the sheet, so that you can cut the outer borders into the print area as well as the inner ones, or work on an 8-up layout on an A4 document page and accept that you'll have to include unprinted outer margins. There is no third option here, even for commercial printing.

[Chris P. Bacon]

From Brother FAQ:

Wondering how do I do this?